Tips for Increasing Social Media Engagement

What's the point in creating top-notch content for your online marketing campaigns if no one reads or engages with what you've created? Or, to paraphrase an old concept, “If a creative tweets at noon on a Wednesday when there's no one online to look at it, does it make an impact?” Well, no. Here are the 10 best ways to increase engagement with that lovingly crafted article or infographic.

Images, Images, Images

Make sure your post includes an image. Twitter now has the functionality to include inline images. By doing this, you can massively increase the amount of retweets. One company found that including inline images got them 150% more retweets. A picture is worth a thousand words, and in our always busy, time-poor culture, any way to fit a thousand words into a post while flicking through a feed is going to be successful.

Use A/B Testing for Your Social Networks

Most Web developers are familiar with this type of testing when building a company website: "Does button color A, or color B lead to more click-throughs?" There's a good reason for doing this: it works. Take a page from their book. Find two headlines you think might work well, and post both of them at roughly the same time (about an hour apart). Then compare the analytics – i.e., the shares, favorites, and click-throughs for each post. Gather the information and use it to help you write headlines in the future.

Time Your Posts

If you want your audience to see what you're posting, then you want to be posting at the time your audience is around to see it. If you post all your content at 9am on a Monday morning, but your target audience doesn't log on until later that evening, then the likelihood is that they won't be around to see it. What's more, different countries and different sites have different peak user times. For example, on Twitter, the most retweets happen about 5pm, whereas people seem to share the most on Facebook at 1pm. There's a lot of freely available research material around these concepts, so make sure you're up to date with the trends of timing. Most social media platforms have the option that allow you to schedule posts so make sure you take full advantage of this feature.

Know Your Enemy

If you want to know why 'Company Y' has more much more engagement on Pinterest than you, the best thing to do is review their page. Have a look at what they pinned and what's popular. This isn't about stealing or plagiarizing content—it's about seeing what tactics work. If people like the way your competition reaches out to them, then it stands to reason that they would like it if you did the same (within reason of course). For example, if 'Company Y' is getting a lot of engagement from sharing photos of kittens playing with their product, maybe you can do something similar with puppies.